It Took This Photographer 100,000 Pics And 3 Months To Get These Surreal Smoke Shapes

Published 6 years ago

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It took 100,000 photographs and three months of work for photographer Thomas Herbrich to capture these breathtaking images of cigarette smoke. The fruits of Herbrich’s labor were just a few golden images for his “Smoke” series, which surprises us with astonishing similarities to familiar shapes, like the human figure.

“I was very surprised by how extremely quickly smoke move,” Herbrich told PetaPixel. “The rising of cigarette-smoke is actually so quick that conventional flash equipment is too slow, as is the photographer – only a few milliseconds pass between recognition of the subject and the taking of the shot, a length of time in which the smoke has already changed again.”

Herbrich had to use a flash duration of 1/10000 sec or even faster to create thousands of images just to capture his beautiful 20. Below are some of our favorites.